Getting Physical

This article presents ethnographic research on a women's self-defense course and proposes that socially available gender narratives of white femininity are potentially disempowering and victimizing to women. Changes in self-narratives as a result of the course reflect a more powerful self that challenges dominant discourses. The process illustrated in this article consists of reframing victimization, liberating the self, and enabling the body in a transformation of gender and self-narratives that affirm “femininity” while subverting its defining ideologies. What results is a physical agency within which narratives about femininity are reinterpreted and reembodied as powerful instead of vulnerable.